Planning Data Management Education Initiatives: Process, Feedback, and Future Directions

Educating researchers in sound data management skills is a hot topic in today’s data intensive research world. Librarians across the country and the world are taking the lead in offering this training to their campus research communities. In Fall, 2013, the Data Curation Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, held a one-day “Data Management Basics” Workshop geared towards graduate students in engineering and science disciplines based on the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum. Students were asked to complete a pre-workshop survey and a series of seven post-module surveys throughout the day. This article discusses the results of the survey feedback, the planning process, and elaborates on important variables in planning data management training initiatives, such as disciplinary adjustments and time constraints. The article concludes with a discussion of the author’s future plans for providing training initiatives based on the feedback he received.